was a socialist, not a right-wing populist,
so in BBC-world those fires did not count.
More significantly, the rate of deforestation
in the Amazon basin is down by 70 per cent
since 2004.
It is probably true that President Jair Bol-
sonaro’s rhetoric has encouraged those who
want to resume logging and clearing forest
and contributed to this year’s uptick in fires
in the country. But was it really necessary to
claim global catastrophe to make this point,
and was it counterproductive? ‘Macron’s
tweet had the same impact on Bolsonaro’s
base as Hillary calling Trump’s base deplor-
able,’ says one Brazilian commentator.
I sometimes wonder if the line wrongly
attributed to Mark Twain, ‘a lie is halfwayround the world before the truth has got
its boots on’, is now taken as an instruction
by environmental pressure groups. They
operate in a viciously competitive mar-
ket for media attention and donations, and
those who scream loudest do best, even if it
later turns out they were telling fibs.
Around the world, wild fires are gener-
ally declining, according to Nasa. Defor-
estation, too, is happening less and less. The
United Nations’ ‘state of the world’s forests’
report concluded last year that ‘the net
loss of forest area continues to slow, from
0.18 per cent [a year] in the 1990s to
0.08 per cent over the last five-year period’.
A study in Nature last year by scientists from
the University of Maryland concluded that
even this is too pessimistic: ‘We show that
— contrary to the prevailing view that forestarea has declined globally — tree cover has
increased by 2.24 million km^2 (+7.1 per cent
relative to the 1982 level).’
This net increase is driven by rapid refor-
estation in cool, rich countries outweigh-
ing slower net deforestation in warm, poor
countries. But more and more nations are
now reaching the sort of income levels
at which they stop deforesting and start
reforesting. Bangladesh, for example, has
been increasing its forest cover for sev-
eral years. Costa Rica has doubled its tree
cover in 40 years. Brazil is poised to join the
reforesters soon.
Possibly the biggest driver of this encour-
aging trend is the rising productivity of agri-
culture. The more yields increase, the less
land we need to steal from nature to feed
ourselves. Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller Uni-
versity has calculated that the world needs
only 35 per cent as much land to produce a
given quantity of food as 50 years ago. That
has spared wild land on a massive scale.
Likewise, getting people on to fossil
fuels and away from burning wood for fuel
spares trees. It is in the poorest countries,
mainly in Africa, that men and women still
gather firewood for cooking and bushmeat
for food, instead of using electricity or gas
and farmed meat.
The trouble with the apocalyptic rhetoric
is that it can seem to justify drastic but dan-
gerous solutions. The obsession with climate
change has slowed the decline of deforesta-
tion. An estimated 700,000 hectares of forest
has been felled in South-East Asia to grow
palm oil to add to supposedly green ‘bio-die-
sel’ fuel in Europe, while the world is feed-
ing 5 per cent of its grain crop to motor cars
rather than people, which means 5 per cent
of cultivated land that could be released for
forest. Britain imports timber from wild for-
ests in the Americas to burn for electricity at
Drax in North Yorkshire, depriving beetles
and woodpeckers of their lunch.
The temptation to moralise on social
media is so strong among footballers, actors
and politicians alike that it is actually doing
harm. Get the economic incentives right and
the world will save its forests. Preach and
preen and prevaricate, and you’ll probably
end up inadvertently depriving more tou-
cans and tapirs of their rainforest habitat.C
ristiano Ronaldo is a Portuguese
expert on forests who also plays
football, so when he shared a picture
online of a recent forest fire in the Amazon,
it went viral. Perhaps he was in a rush that
day to get out of the laboratory to football
training, because it later transpired that the
photograph was actually taken in 2013, not
this year, and in southern Brazil, nowhere
near the Amazon.
But at least his picture was only six years
old. Emmanuel Macron, another forest ecol-
ogist who moonlights as president of France,
claimed that ‘the Amazon rainforest — the
lungs which produce 20 per cent of our plan-
et’s oxygen — is on fire!’ alongside a picture
that was 20 years old. A third bioscientist,
who goes under the name of Madonna and
sings, capped both their achievements by
sharing a 30-year-old picture.
Now imagine if some celebrity — Donald
Trump, say, or Nigel Lawson — had shared a
picture of a pristine tropical forest with the
caption ‘Amazon rainforest’s doing fine!’
and it had turned out to be decades old or
from the wrong area. The BBC’s ‘fact-check-
ers’ would have been all over it, seizing the
opportunity to mock, censor and ostracise.
In fact, ‘Amazon rainforest’s doing fine’
is a lot closer to the truth than ‘Amazon
rainforest — the lungs which produce 20 per
cent of our planet’s oxygen — is on fire!’.
The forest is not on fire. The vast majority of
this year’s fires are on farmland or already
cleared areas, and the claim that the Ama-
zon forest produces 20 per cent of the oxy-
gen in the air is either nonsensical or wrong
depending on how you interpret it (in any
case, lungs don’t produce oxygen). The
Amazon, like every ecosystem, consumes
about as much oxygen through respiration
as it produces through photosynthesis so
there is no net contribution; and even on a
gross basis, the Amazon comprises less than
6 per cent of oxygen production, most of
which happens in the ocean.
But it is the outdated nature of the pic-
tures shared by celebs that is most reveal-
ing, because the number of fires in Brazil
this year is more than last year, but about
the same as in 2016 and less than in 2002,
2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2010 and 2012.
For most of those years, Brazil’s presidentSmoke and mirrors
The most dangerous thing about the Amazon fires is the apocalyptic rhetoric
MATT RIDLEY
Moralising on social m edia
from footballers, actors and
politicians is actually doing harm‘We got it on Amazon.’